Birdcatcher
by Spicy Castiel
Summary: Cersei needs to annul the marriage between Joffrey and Sansa. Littlefinger convinces the small council of his own selfish plan. Will he succeed? Will Sansa fall for the trap? And is the only one who Lord Baelish has feelings for really himself?
1. Heavy Doors

**Chapter I: Heavy Doors**

 **Petyr**

"Not an option. The northerners will turn against us even faster." Littlefinger stepped nervously through the room. He felt cold for the first time in years. Anger appeared on Cersei's face, her mouth formed a line and her eyes narrowed. "Would it be an option to marry the daughter of a traitor?" hissed Cersei. The air smelled like the oncoming weather, wet and cold.

"A violent storm is coming. I can smell it. The northeners will come, yes. So does winter. However, Ned's oldest son will have problems with attacking the royal family if his beloved sister is part of it." the eunuch smiled widely.

Varys had understood. Lord Bealish knew that he'd support him. Varys knew that a friendship with him is more precious than all the gold of Castamaer. Littlefinger refilled his gold plated glass with wine. He hated to do this himself, but Cersei had banned all the servants due to her intense fear of spies. He raised his voice after he took a sip of the wine.

"Make the northeners see her disgrace. Distract them, Your Grace." he suggested. "Make her sing a terrible song. Let everybody watch." He smiled widely, slowly turning the glass in his hands.

"What are you thinking of?" Cercei demanded, "This girl is trained like a dog. She wouldn't even flinch if I would hit her."

He still turned the glass in his hands, looking at the reflections of the quivering light, feeling his curves and edges with his fingertips. "That's a good thing really. She's like a puppet. We just have to play her." Lord Baelish raised his eyebrows. "Free the little bird, and watch her forget all the tricks she learned. Give Lady Sansa freedom, and she'll forget the danger which is still hiding behind her back." He replaced the glass on the table and focused n the Queen with his grey eyes.

"Send someone she trusts with her, someone who pretends to be on her side, but is secretly leading her. In the wrong direction." The Queen wasn't smiling, but Petyr knew that she was more than pleased with his plan.

Varys had doubts. "I don't think that Sansa is stupid enough to trust anybody these days." Cersei and the Eunuch were thinking that he's doing everything just for his own benefits, therefore the question from Varys. They weren't wrong, he was doing it for his own benefits. But they had no choice. He knew his plan was the best, and the only one they had.

"Our sweet little Sansa believes in fairy tales, lets give her one." Petyr smiled and knew, he had the permission to do whatever has to be done. That evening, when he felt asleep, the smirk was still resting on his lips. "And trusting and following orders, isn't the same thing, My Lord."

 **Sansa**

Many people were there. She felt that even through the heavy doors. There wasn't loud laughter like there used to be in Winterfell, but she heard the heated discussions clearly, many thrilled voices. The smell of bread found his way through the heavy wood.

 _Of course they're not laughing, stupid_ , she thought to herself. Sansa stayed in front of the door, enjoying the last seconds of her beloved loneliness.

 _There's war, nobody has any reason to laugh_.

She didn't want to open the door. She didn't want to sit at a table with all these liars, murderers and traitors. She didn't want to smile, to pretend that she's enjoying her food, when secretly wants to throw up every she slowly pushed the door open, barely anyone noticed her.

The men and the Queen, who were sitting at the table, were too involved in their fight of words. Only a few eyes caught her standing there, but didn't seemed to be interested in her at all.

Except master of coins didn't move his eyes from Sansa. He stared at her like she hadn't noticed it. It seemed like Petyr Baelish would deduct her with his silver-blue eyes. He folded his hands in his lap. For a second there was a tender smile on Lord Baelish's face. More and more blood was flooding into her cheeks when she was slowly walking to her seat next to the Queen.

The meal consisted of roasted venison, giant salmon, cooked carrots, and countless other sorts of vegetables. Sansa couldn't even swallow. She thought of all the people outside the great wall that surrounded the castle. She thought of all the suffering, hunger, and the pain out there. She thought of her sister, her brothers and her parents.

She was sitting there, pretending when a hand was placed on her shoulder. Before she could stand and identify the owner of the hand, she heard the tender voice of Lord Baelish.

"Lady Sansa, may I have the honor?" He removed his hand from her shoulder. She knew that she was supposed to stand up and follow him. Sansa gave the Queen an unsettled look. She needed the Queen's permission to go with him. She knew that she was a prisoner, a hostage of the Queen.

Cersei's green eyes linked with Sansa's. She started to smile with her flawless lips and gave her a nod. There it was, the permission to leave.

The left the hall through the heavy door, making their way through the corridors. The candels on the walls spend them light, but they flickered as a cold gasp of air crepped the corridors. The wind outside was screaming loudly, sounding like a crying child. Sansa got gossebumps. She tried to make eyecontact with Lord Bealish, but he just walked beside her, his steps silent and fast on the dark stone floor, which reflected the light hazy.

Finally, he slowed down. Sansa still had no clue what the reason was for her sudden departure with Lord Baelish, but she supposed it wasn't a good one. The entire situation was very unpeasant. She wished it would end as soon as possible, so tht she could crawl back into her bed, waiting for better times.

The nescience had slowly increased Sansa's nervousness. She felt knots in her stomach growing with each step. She knew Littlefinger, she knew about the feelings he'd felt for her mother a long time ago.

Suddenly she was hopeful again, believing in a happy ending. This little spark of hope vanished when she thought about her situation. He, too, belonged to the Queen, as did Varys and Joffrey. The queen would never let her escape.

They finally had reached his cambers, heading into his solar. The door murmured when they stepped through it. In his room, she noticed the sweet smell of spiced wine and flowers. Finally the silence between them was broken.

"Why have you brought me here, Lord Baelish?" Sansa asked as she slowly walked in the direction of the desk covered with paper and letters. She sat down on the with black leather covered chair in front of the desk and crossed her legs. The way he looked at her made her shiver. For a few moments she thought she had seen desire in his eyes, but she had to be wrong. The imprisonment, always being watched by Cersei and her hate for Joffrey already made her see things which weren't there.

"You know how risky the situation here is?" sighed Petyr. He smiled and continued. "Besides that, I suppose you know that you are the Queen's hostage. One of the most important hostages in this big, sick Queen is sending you to Dorne, so that she won't lose her most important leverage." Sansa froze. She was so confident about the fact, that she was going to be released. She swallowed hard and started to play with a strand of copper hair.

"And how did I come to have the honor of having this message delivered by the Master of Coin, My Lord?" He motioned for her to stand, and did the same thing himself, heading to Sansa's side of the desk. He stopped when he was standing only a few steps away from her.

Lord Baelish took her pale face in both of his hands and pushed her softly to the edge of his desk, forced her to make eye contact, which she was trying to avoid so badly. The beguiling smell of spiced wine hit her even more intensely than before and she realized that Baelish was the source of it, not his room. Sansa liked the smell, wanted to never stop inhaling it. Grey eyes made contact with blue.

"I'll accompany you." his voice was gentle and made Sansa's heart jump a little. She was feeling a strange, unfamiliar feeling, deep in her stomach. Sansa's facade broke into pieces. She was so utterly done with everything. The War, her monster of a husband, the isolation she was living in and her father. Most of all her father. Tears streamed down her blushing cheeks.

Petyr looked like he would have expected that. Her silent crying grew to a crying fit. When he wrapped his arms around her waist, Sansa forgot, only for a few seconds, that the man in front of her was as much of a stranger to her as anyone else in the castle and let his strong arms caress her.

Her lungs seemed to fail and she tried to force her breath down to them, gasping for air. She wrapped her arms even tighter around him and hoped that she wouldn't bruise him, buried her face in the curve of his neck. She left the hug after a short eternity and wiped the last few tears off her face.

He was watching her with neither pity nor amusement. Sansa was surprised at how pleasantly the man in front of her handled her moment of weakness. He seemed to understand, to know.

At least he was asking no questions, which Sansa knew was very unusual for Littlefinger. There was no man in all the seven kingdoms that liked hearing the sound of his own voice more than Petyr Baelish.

"Our ships set sails tomorrow morning, sweetling. Try to get some sleep." He smiled weakly and kissed her forehead. "Dream well, Sansa Stark."


	2. The Queen Of The Horizont

The next day, she was standing on deck of the _Queen of the Horizon_ before sunrise. She watched how the white fluffy clouds slowly moved in front of the sun and immediately changed color from the clean white to dark red. _Blood red,_ was Sansa's first thought, or the deep red of wine.

King's Landing was waking up from its deep sleep. People began to build their booths in the market, the first diligent fishermen left the port with their small boats.

Shutters were opened up and some infants started to cry. She was in the middle of it all. She felt the heartbeat of the city clearly, for the first time since she arrived there. The ship she was standing on was for its size rather lonesome. Some of the tiny fishing boats around the Queen seemed like they had more people on them than the enormous ship, Sansa was standing on. The young girl inhaled the cold morning air, which pureness let her brain finally awake fully.

She turned her head from the stunning sunrise to the narrow door, which directly led into the belly of the ship. Its inside consisted of many corridors and rooms, which were covered with deep red carpets, they really looked like the veins and muscles of some big scary animal.

 _I hope it won't swallow and digest me_ , she thought internally. The Queen of the Horizon belonged to Lord Baelish; that was as obvious as the fact that Arya was her father's daughter. The wide leather furniture present in every room and the heavy curtains in front of every window made the rooms appear dark, even when the sun shined with all its power. There was that sweet smell of spiced wine everywhere. Again. Time to time Sansa asked herself why she had never seen Lord Baelish being drunk. Literally everything that this man touched seemed to be taken over with this sweetish smell.

Beside the servants, there were a bunch of wine dealers. Even they worked for Lord Baelish. That's why he smells like wine all the time, his entire existence is constructed of wine and whores, Sansa realized, but she couldn't blame him. It's weird that there was still use for wine.

People were starving, fighting to stay alive, and at the same time other people still had the time and money to drink expensive wine.

After she turned away from the horizon, she realized that it was not the deck of the ship that smelled like Littlefinger so intensely. No, Petyr himself stood a few steps behind her. After Sansa noticed him, he stepped closer. He leaned his slender body against the railing next to her, smiling tiredly. "I always liked sunrises better than sunsets, they're the beginning of everything. They are the ending too. The ending of darkness. It's fascinating." Sansa remembered the usual greyness of the sky in Winterfell and hesitated.

"What does this all mean, My Lord?" Her hair was messed up by the wind and she had to pull the strands out of her face every few seconds.

"Call me Petyr. You may leave the formalities in Kings Landing, Sansa." Sansa noticed how he avoided her question. He knows more than me, so much more. She tried to act charming, just like him. She smiled, tried to look him as deep in the eyes as possible, put pressure on him. "What does all of this mean, Petyr?"

"I already told you the most important things, let the rest be my burden." He avoided her question again and Sansa knew that there was no sense in asking him another time.

"Do you want to dance?" Sansa felt irritated.

 _What's the matter with you, Lord Baelish? What are you hiding from me?_ Was she in any position to reject the offer? She was on his ship, with his servants, and wouldn't get much other company for the next time. Besides that, she wanted to feel his touch again.

It seemed strange to dance on a ship without music and without any real reason to dance. Sansa knew that Lord Baelish wouldn't ever breach her personal space without her permission. She gave him a nod and Petyr Baelish wrapped his hands around her waist, just like the night before. He came closer, and for a moment she thought that their lips would collide. Then, he started to whisper, and his steps got faster.

"We are being watched, sweet Sansa. You are not safe, not as long as we are in King's Landing. Maybe even not after that. Even on this ship, Varys and the Queen have their eyes everywhere." They were still dancing in circles, and the wood creaked underneath their feet. As soon as the ship began to slide out of the port, she realized what this change meant for her.

 _I could escape, maybe._ The Queen is so far away. Because of this insight, she began to wonder if the events of the last few hours were real. Her blue dress, which crinkled in the lukewarm wind, was the only thing which felt real. And him. His glances, his caring, the way he talked to her.

Sansa couldn't control her feelings anymore. Was he really looking at her that way? She didn't want to be the sweet child anymore, no, she wanted him to see her as woman.

Sansa Stark. She wanted to be seen by him, she enjoyed the glances that he was giving her more and more often. A few weeks before, Sansa had come to Kings Landing, full of love for Joffrey, admiring the Queen, so naive and weak. But now she was broken, she didn't want to live by the rules anymore, the rules of this stupid game. Sansa wanted to live.


End file.
